retailers

A post on r/amiibo today cut through the post-Dark Pit celebrations/commiserations to deliver a grim warning: the world was but one week and change away from what was sure to be another profound boondoggle. According to an an...

Tower of Guns, a delightful FPS roguelike, and Ether One, a beautiful adventure game, are going backwards in time and releasing in physical boxes this September. Ether One will have retail copies for PC and PS4, while To...

Well-known retailer GAME has gone bankrupt in Sweden. This might sound familiar to UK readers, as the same company went bankrupt in the UK back in 2012, risking many shops being closed down until it merged with retailer Games...

So far, I've missed every single opportunity to try Splatoon. Folks who made an effort to participate in the time-restricted Global Test Fire demo have had encouraging things to say about the game, which has me simu...

As of today you can pre-order the Nintendo NX from EB Games Australia. Yep, you can go into an EB Games store in Australia and give them money to reserve you a piece of hardware that right now is literally only a name. Are yo...

Child of Light was late to Vita, coming in July.That the handheld wasn't a priority Ubisoft can't belie.
And yet, what's this, a North American physical Vita release in March?Could it be Ubisoft doesn't want to leave our hand...

A new study finds buying a game at retail may have a less significant impact on the environment than downloading the same title.
The Journal of Industrial Ecology recently published a report dubbed "The Carbon Footprint ...

To the surprise of probably no one, it looks like the vast majority of PC games that are sold are through digital channels. PC site PCR has been told by analyst DFC Intelligence that in 2013, 92% of games sold were digital, w...

Dragon Quest X will receive a retail release, but with a catch: there will be no cartridge inside. Instead, in the retail packaging, you will receive a code to download the game from the Nintendo eShop, a 60-day online play v...

Following the abhorrent trend of announcing different preorder bonuses across different retailers is Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, which is shipping with six different doodads depending on where you go. Fortunately, it's not ...

A few days ago, we heard that retailer GameStop could be gearing up for "getting involved at the time of game development where there could be some content exclusive to [the retailer] included in the game." Naturally, few peo...

Concerned over how you're going to pick up Bayonetta in addition to its sequel when it finally hits the Wii U? Not sure how you want to purchase the game so that you'll get a copy of the first game? Worry no more -- at least,...

Not too long ago, we announced that Goat Simulator would be receiving a retail release in the UK. A boxed version of the bizarre farm animal simulator was awesome news, but North American gamers were still relegated to the di...

We told you last month that GameStop is looking to open about 400 tech stores this year in an effort to pivot their business toward the mobile and tablet side of things. That plan is still in place, but it comes with some clo...

Sony has announced a release date for the Borderlands 2 PlayStation Vita bundle today via PlayStation Blog. The bundle, which marks the first release of the handheld's slimmer hardware redesign in North America, will be avai...

Telltale's widely acclaimed series based on The Walking Dead may soon arrive on Xbox One. NeoGAF poster MauroNL spotted listings for the Game of the Year edition of the first season and the second season on the webs...

We know GameStop sells games and consoles as their bread and butter, but they want to get in on the tech game as well. They're investing up to $40 million in stores that will sell tech hardware, like phones and tablets. Their...

Last month we learned aged rental giant Blockbuster would draw its last breath on US soil by January 2014, when all 300 remaining locations would be shut down.
Blockbuster UK is beating us to the punch, it seems. The 91 remai...

GameStop sold its entire stock of PS4 systems at launch, and then moved through an extra allocations from Sony. But 2.3 million customers on their "first to know" list are still waiting for the shiny new system, reports Games...

For those who've pre-ordered PS4 games with Amazon, make sure to check your inbox as the online retailer has been sending out emails offering a special Buy 2 Get 1 free deal on PS4 titles. There's also rumors of some Buy One ...

Joining the ever-growing list of leaked Black Friday sales ads, Dell.com's turkey day extravaganza has hit the web. While nothing too exciting, something that seems to be the trend this year, there are a few decent deals&nbsp...

Dish Network announced that they'll be closing all the 300 or so remaining corporate-owned Blockbuster retail locations in the United States by January 2014. They'll be shutting down the DVD mail service middle of December to...

Target is running a promotion right now where they'll give you a $200 for any iPad. Yes, even the first-generation one. That's insane, considering you could possibly get $100 at best if you were to sell it through an auction ...

It'll take you forever to flip through this leaked Black Friday ad from Toys R Us, so we've done the work for you. There's nothing too exciting, but there are plenty of solid deals.
The biggest deal is probably the PS3 bundle...

The Ouya has had no small amount of supporters, but for "the little open-source console that could," real success might be seen at the brick-and-mortar level. After having been available in select Target stores for the last f...

If you're a UK resident and pre-ordered your PS4 from SimplyGames, you might want to check on the status of your order, as the retailer has apparently hiked the previously locked in price of £349.99 to £414....

Sep 07 //
Joshua Derocher
All game consoles are called "Nintendos"
Grandmothers don't know the difference between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. They are just little boxes that get hooked up the television and play video games. A lot of older people just call all game consoles "Nintendos," or sometimes "PlayStations," if their kid grew up with a Sony machine. The brand means nothing to them.
One of the frequent things I had to deal with was explaining that they had to buy games that matched the box their kids had at home. Parents or grandparents would often come in to exchange a game for the same title on a different system. They didn't know what any of the differences in the systems were, and they generally didn't care since they were buying the games for other people.
The Wii U is a tablet for the Wii
I worked over the span of the Wii U being announced, through its launch, and over the first Christmas it was out. People had no idea what the thing was, why they needed it, and why Nintendo felt the need to stop making games for the old Wii.
The name was a really bad choice. I am not just saying that as a writer spouting out my thoughts on how the industry should be, I am saying it because people had no idea what the fuck the thing was. People thought it was a tablet or a new controller for their Wii, so they didn't care about it. They only started to take notice when new games came out that they couldn't run on their Wii, like New Super Mario Bros. U.
Some people were interested in a new Nintendo console, but they didn't understand what this one did that was cool. They were searching for a catch, like the Wii's motion controls. People bought the Wii because it had the motion controls, and they didn't get why the new Wii had this tablet thing.
In the end, the Wii U had a solid launch week. We sold out and had a lot people calling to ask if they were back in stock. Sadly, a good chunk of these folks were just buying it for a quick flip on eBay, or they thought they were getting a jump on the hot item for Christmas. A lot them ended up being returned before the holidays, and by December we stopped selling them completely.
People don't care about ESRB ratings
Parents don't read ratings on boxes, and they generally don't understand the system. To me, it's not the fault of the ESRB or the stores selling the games. We had large signs up all over the game section talking about ratings, and in order to sell an M-rated game we had to scan an ID of someone over 17. Kids weren't walking in and buying Modern Warfare 3 -- they had their mothers buy it for them.
Parents didn't take the time to read what content was in the games, and maybe they don't mind if their kids play violent videogames, but I can't imagine that they are making an informed decision if they don't read what's on the box. It's up to them what they want to let their kids play, but it kind of scares me that they don't really know what they are buying or what's in it. One kid, no older than ten, had his mother buy him a copy of Duke Nukem Forever, and I am pretty sure he's going to end up scarred for life.
The general population still thinks that games are for kids, and the concept that they are filled with gratuitous violence, sexual themes, and stories involving alcoholism or suicide doesn't enter their minds. To them, something violent is like the original Halo, which just had a lot of aliens getting shot. They haven't seen the brutality of something like Modern Warfare 3 or God of War III.
Anytime I sold a game to a parent, I always made it a point to let them know why we were carding them for it, and I would point out the ratings box that said what the game had for content. A few parents decided to put the game back after they learned it had nudity, graphic violence, suggestive themes, or blood and gore. Some parents still bought the games, saying "How bad can it be? It's a videogame, after all."
People don't read reviews before they buy
In the gaming community there can be a lot of drama surrounding review scores. High scores are accused of being sellouts, and low scores come from the haters who don't understand the game. Review threads often have hundreds of comments from people talking about the score. We are the weird ones for reading reviews and talking about review scores. The public just buys games based on the series' clout or the cool commercial they saw for it. Marketing departments know this, and that's why we keep getting endless sequels, billboards, and commercials during the Super Bowl.
The day Resident Evil 6 came out, people were hyped for it because it was another Resident Evil game. They were convinced it was going to be the best thing ever. Destructoid's Jim Sterling gave it a 3 out of 10, and it wasn't the only negative review I had seen, so I asked people if they had taken the time to read any reviews before they bought it. They didn't even know what I was talking about.
I said things like "Destructoid," "IGN," or "GameSpot," and they had no idea what I was saying. Videogame sites and reviews are unknown to the population at large, which is mind-boggling to me since games are sixty bucks a pop on launch day. If I ever spent $60 on something that I thought was terrible, I would do way more research the next time.
Game genres don't mean anything to people
If I described something as a role-playing game, a first-person shooter, or real-time strategy game, you would already have an idea of what the game was like. Teenagers and moms don't know what these labels mean, and I would often have to say a shooter was like Call of Duty, or that a platformer played like Mario.
What I found the most interesting about this is that not only do they not know what genre a game would be considered, they really don't care, either. They simply play games they think are fun, and they honestly don't care for one genre above another. These are the people who might only play a couple of games a year, and they just play what looks cool or what their friends are playing. They don't think about the mechanics or the controls and compare it to another game and try to classify what they like about them.
People don't have a preference of what type of game they want to play, and that's what caused them to not understand terms like RPG, or platformer. To them, it's just a game, which I don't think is a bad thing. Genres are helpful to understand what a game is like, but it also hurts developers who borrow a lot of elements from popular games of the genre they are developing in. Things would probably be better if every game in the first person didn't play like Call of Duty.
There are real people who only play Madden and Call of Duty
We often make comments about mainstream gamers and how they will only buy two games a year: the new Madden and Call of Duty. Well guess what, it's totally true. There are people who will only buy these two popular games, and that's all they play.
It's not one or two guys -- it's a crapton of people. Launch day doesn't really matter for any other game, but when one of these games come out we have hundreds of copies of both ready to go when the store opens. The store I worked at was in a small town in Maine and we were easily able to sell them out quickly. Guys between 15- and 30-years-old would meander into the store all day to buy their copy, and talk about how excited they were to play it with their bro friends while drinking some Bud Light over the weekend.
We are the minority, and while we may spend a lot of time talking about our hobby and reading articles online, we will never be larger then the general gaming public. It's changed a little bit about how I write about games marketing and development, but the people that really need to pay attention to stuff like this are publishers.
A lot of the time, we are an insular community with developers and publishers spending a lot of time talking to games press and enthusiasts. We have that system down -- we all know what's going on, what games are coming out that we want to buy, and how to check if a game is going to be any good before we buy it.
What we don't have is a way for the public at large to know things like the fact that the Wii U is a new console with all-new games. That you can buy digital games not available in stores, or you should read a few reviews before spending your hard-earned money. That you can buy games significantly cheaper a few months after they come out. Publishers will never come out and educate the public about where to read game reviews, since to them an educated public is dangerous and less likely to buy their over-marketed crappy product.
I think the best thing we can do is to tell our friends who play games to read the blogs. Tell them to read a review before they buy a game on launch day, and that maybe they should hold off on pre-ordering something until they know more about it.
[Header image source]

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